Ohio Good Friday

Dateline Columbus, Ohio

Looking for a coffee in the shopping Mall near where we were staying, I espied a lengthy queue of mothers and children. "I hope", I muttered to myself, "they're not all queueing for coffee.  

Scrutinising them a little more closely, I realised that they were not. They were queuing for something else, namely....

Who was posing for photographs, presumably for a small fee. I think this was Mrs Bunny,

possibly on the same lines as  Mrs Claus 

   The children were all dolled up like the Painted Babies, in frilly tutus, pastel party dresses, fairy wings, net and sequins and even the babies had elaborate glittery hairbands. Call me old-fashioned but it was a rather surreal sight for Good Friday.

Elsewhere, also perhaps surprisingly, rather more people - possibly a couple of thousand - queued up to kiss the Cross at the Good Friday liturgy at St Patrick's Church and the neo-Gothic Cathedral (below) held a rather splendid night-time "Tenebrae" service with fabulous Gregorian Chant and the "Miserere" by Allegri, hitting such spectacularly high notes that I almost got vertigo. As the last candle was extinguished and the Cathedral plunged into spooky darkness, everyone in the packed building was told to bang their fists on the pews to symbolise the earthquake at the death of Christ. The kids with us simply loved it.   Yup, America is a land of contrasts....